On Tuesday (March 5th), Binance announced that the third cryptoasset to be offered for sale this year on Binance Launchpad would be Celer Network's CELR token. In this article, we try to answer all the questions you might have about Binance Launchpad, the Celer Network, the CELR token, and about the CELR sale event, which is taking place on March 19th.

What Is Binance Launchpad?

On January 3rd, as reported by CryptoGlobe, Binance said that its token launch platform, which was originally created in 2017, was planning to offer for sale one new token "every month in 2019, starting with BitTorrent and Fetch.AI," and that the purpose of Binance Launchpad was to help "blockchain projects raise funds and increase their reach across the crypto ecosystem" by "offering a project’s tokens to up to more than 10 million Binance users," thereby granting Binance users the "chance to be part of potentially game-changing projects."

As reported by CryptoGlobe, the Binance CEO, Changpeng Zhao ("CZ" for short) held an Ask Me Anything (AMA) session on March 5th, during which he commented on Binance Launchpad. He started by first talking about the main goals of Binance Launchpad:

"Launchpad is a place where we want to help good projects raise money, but it's not only about raising money. We want to help them raise awareness and exposure... We also help them raise liquidity after the Launchpad initial sale. If nothing goes unexpected, they have a very high chance of getting listed on Binance."

He next talked about how Binance and project teams decide on the initial offer price for the tokens being launched:

"We have a choice. We can try top advise the projects to keep the initial sale price low. We think that's a good thing. Do you want it low or high? Most people will choose the initial sale price to be low. When the initial sale price is low, we generate very high demand. So, basically, by design, a very large number of people will not be able to grab it. So, it is a rush sale type of event... We don't know how to price it perfectly so everybody gets and the guys who didn't want it don't get it. So, we want there to be higher demand than supply in the initial sale stage, and this will also help with the listing. When that coin is listed later on, a high demand will help drive the price even higher, hopefully."

What Is Celer Network?

Celer Network is "a leading layer-2 scaling platform that enables fast, easy and secure off-chain transactions for not only payment transactions, but also generalized off-chain smart contracts. It enables everyone to quickly build, operate, and use highly scalable decentralized applications through innovations in off-chain scaling techniques and incentive-aligned cryptoeconomics."

It was founded by Mo Dong, Junda Liu, Xiaozhou Li, Qingkai Liang, who have "PhDs from MIT, Princeton, UC Berkeley and UIUC," and the team is said to have "years of industry experiences from top startups or tech giants like Google, Amazon, Cisco, HP and more. Its strategic partners include Pantera Capital, FBG Capital, and Arrington XRP Capital.

Here is how they explain the need for and the importance of off-chain scaling for blockchains such as Ethereum:

"Blockchains such as Ethereum are slow because each operation needs to be processed by most of the nodes to reach on-chain consensus, which is exactly "how to build a super slow distributed system" every CS student learned from their Computer Systems 101. New on-chain consensus improvements such as sharding and various Proof-of-X are keep getting proposed and developed. They make the blockchain relatively faster with different tradeoffs, but cannot change the fundamental limitations of on-chain consensus, and thus are far from Internet-level scalability."

And here is the team explaining how Celer Network differs from off-chain payment networks such as the Raiden Network:

"Celer Network is a platform for highly scalable decentralized applications, with a payment network being one component of the ecosystem. Off-chain transactions in Celer can be arbitrary fraud-proof state transitions such as generic conditional payment, multi-party game move, second price auction bid, high-frequency token exchange, etc.
Existing off-chain payment proposals have significant defects in generality, routing, and cryptoeconomics. While Celer has a much bigger scope than payment solutions, it also makes groundbreaking improvements to off-chain payment networks on both technical and cryptoeconomic fronts."

"Off-chain scaling techniques allow mutually distrustful parties to execute a contract locally among themselves instead of the global blockchain. Involved parties maintain a fraud-proof off-chain replicated state machine, and only resort to on-chain consensus when absolutely necessary (e.g., when two parties disagree on a state). Off-chain scaling is not merely an optimization but the only way to support fully scale-out dApps with better privacy and no compromise on the trust and decentralization guarantees. It is the inflection point for blockchain mass adoption and will be the engine behind all large scale decentralized applications."

"Off-chain platform enables fully scale-out dApps because most transactions are processed by only involved participants, while still being secure and trust-free. The total system throughput can near-linearly increase as more nodes join. Therefore, billions or even more transactions per second can be achieved as long as enough nodes and applications are running on the off-chain platform."

According to Binance Research, the Celer team "has launched CelerX, a testnet app that showcases the quick transaction process on the Celer Network." Their fact sheet on Celer Network mentions the following features/achievements:

"Zero off-chain smart contract transaction fees"

"Already achieved 10,000X transaction latency reduction"

"Accelerates both payment and smart contracts"

"100X fee reduction for micro-payment on Ethereum comparing to directly transacting on Ethereum"

What Is the CELR Token Good For?

Binance Research says that the CELR token "drives cEconomy, the off-chain cryptoeconomic incentive structure of Celer Network," and it does so in the following ways:

"CELR serves as an incentive for maintaining a stable and abundant liquidity pool in Proof of Liquidity Commitment process."

"CELR is used in Liquidity Backing Auction to increase the priority of liquidity backing bids and therefore statistically increase the liquidity interests payout."

"CELR is used in State Guardian Network as a membership staking token to protect state availability, provide connectivity oracle and act as a dispute state transition computation engine. CELR token stakers receives service fee for the various services they provided for the network."

"CELR token can also be used to pay the service fee and transaction fee to off-chain service providers."

When and How Is the Celer Network (CELR) Token Taking Place?

The CELR token sale will start on Binance Launchpad on March 19th at 14:00 (UTC), and will have one session, which will only accept the Binance Coin (BNB) for payment.

The rest of the sale details are as follows:

"Total Token Supply: 10,000,000,000 CELR"

"Initial Circulating Supply: 20% of Total Token Supply"

"Total Tokens Allocated to Binance Launchpad: 597,014,925 CELR"

"Public Token Sale Price: 1 CELR = 0.0067 USD (Prices in BNB will be set on the day of the sale)"

"Token Sale Format: First come first served basis" (so make sure you have a fast internet connection if you want to take part in the sale)